Insights Into the Future of the Laptop

An anonymous reader writes "ThinkPad founder Arimasa Naitoh sat down for a chat with CNET.com.au about the future of the laptop. The article includes a few concept design images, as well as details on why Lenovo believes that fuel-cell technology is poor and that Origami will never succeed as a primary device." From the article: "Although Lenovo has traditionally targeted the business crowd, it recently released the consumer-targeted Lenovo 3000 series, as 'many people want to have a ThinkPad that is not black'. Naitoh shuns the use of aluminium in laptop manufacturing, calling it 'weak', instead praising titanium (used in the construction of the 3000) for its light-weight and scratch-resistant properties. Naitoh also showed off a number of ThinkPad concept designs with innovations such as raising displays and removable keyboards. He didn't give any word on whether these would be incorporated into official ThinkPad models, but we've snagged some pictures for you anyway."

Comments

Re:ARM powered laptop with flash

[simp]

It was made 10 years ago, the Psion 5MX. For it's time it was very good. The included agenda/database software is even today a good match for the modern PDAs. Unfortunately these days everybody seems to be facinated with running Windows CE on a small PDA screen and call it an improvement... I'm getting old.

Re:Titanium - Scratch Resisitant??

[dbIII]

If you treat the surface to make it a nitride you get a very hard surface and a nice gold colour - take a look at industrial cutting tools for an example. Titanium alloys are a bit stronger than aluminium alloys but are a pain to work with and very expensive. As for strength - the same thickness of a half decent steel is stronger than a titanium alloy but of course the titanium alloy is lighter in weight.

Alumiumium alloys can also be fairly scratch resistant if they are anodised to give a thick hard oxide layer - probably what has been done with the alumiumium powerbook.

Re:Titanium - Scratch Resisitant??

[engagebot]

The problem is that not all of the TiBook was actually Ti. Only the casing of the screen is actually Ti, and the whole bottom casing is just silver-colored plastic. The white frame that goes around the edge of the machine is some other kind of metal thats painted white. All these painted surfaces scratch off and look beat up, whereas the AlBook is actuallly silver.

Re:Titanium - Scratch Resisitant??

[dhovis]

Well, it may depend on the specific alloy they use. The Ti-Powerbooks were made using CP-Ti(Commercially Pure). Frankly, that isn't a structural alloy. In fact, it has no alloying elements at all! Now the lay person would say "It's really pure, it must be really strong!". Bzzzzz....Wrong. That makes it fairly soft compared to, say Ti-6Al-4V, which is kind of the standard titanium alloy that is used for most things titanium.

With the Al-books, Apple switched to an "aircraft grade" aluminum alloy. That can mean a lot of things, but generally, aircraft grade aluminum alloys are some of the strongest, lightest alloys on the market. It is also a lot easier to form aluminum. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the Al-books were forged, which would increase their strength. There is no way they could have forged the Ti-book parts, forging titanium is a very expensive process. Also, the Al-books were hard anodized, which leaves them with a thin, hard, adherent layer of Al2O3 on the surface. Al2O3 is also known as sapphire, so it adds to the scrach resistance, at least for superficial scraches, anyway.

Now, I am a Ph.D. Materials Scientist, so I would be remiss if I didn't mention that scratch resistance and strength are two entirely different things. Generally, making something scratch resistant will also make it brittle. If you had to choose between your laptop scratching or shattering, I know which one I'd choose.

That is as much insight as I can probably provide. My expertise these days is on the high temperature oxidation of Ni-based superalloys.